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What Scientists Know Today About Climate

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Running time 0:56

Climate scientists discuss what they know about global climate change today, and how they know it.

Transcript

Dr. Jay Lawrimore, NOAA National Climatic Data Center:

Well, we know the climate of the world is warming…

Dr. Chris Landsea, NOAA National Hurricane Center:

Certainly there is climate change. We’ve seen about a degree Fahrenheit warming in over a hundred years.

Dr. Jay Lawrimore, NOAA National Climatic Data Center:

… and we know that’s having an impact on other areas of the climate in addition to temperature, in and of itself. And we know that the changes in climate are having an impact on society. And we know that the climate will continue to change and that these impacts will likely become greater in the future.

Dr. David Easterling, NOAA National Climatic Data Center:

…impacts that we’re yet to really be able to quantify…

Dr. Jay Lawrimore, NOAA National Climatic Data Center:

There will possibly be some benefits but negative impacts will be much greater than the positive impacts from climate change.

Professor Naomi Oreskes, University of California, San Diego:

We have a lot of different kinds of data. We have data from climate models. We have data from ice cores. We have data on solar variation. We have data on paleoclimatology. And you look at all these different lines of data — independent lines of evidence collected by different scientists, some of whom don’t even like each other, and you find it all fits together.